Zbynek Zeman was the first director of Amnesty's research department. Photograph: Franta Provaznik

The historian Zbynek Zeman, who has died aged 82, was one of the leading British interpreters of 20th-century eastern Europe. Born in Czechoslovakia, he became a naturalised Englishman after the communist coup d'etat of 1948, and taught at British universities for 40 years before he retired to Prague after the fall of communism in 1989.

He had a succinct and readable style which he perfected when writing for the Economist in the early 1960s. Most of his publications, reflecting a life which had been cut in two by Europe's east-west division, sought to explain the forces of nationalism and communism which had traumatically shaped east-central Europe.

Particularly impressive were two works at either end of his career. His first book, The Break-up of the Habsburg Empire, 1914-18, published in 1961, is still the best single work on the subject and is naturally incisive on the Czechs. In it he showed how pressures inside as well as outside combined to destroy Austria-Hungary in the first world war. One of his final works, Pursued By a Bear: The Making of Eastern Europe (1989), which he modestly termed an "essay", was an ambitious effort to understand the "uniqueness" of 20th-century eastern Europe. It was, he wrote, "drafted by a historian who has had the fortune to observe the fate of the region over the long term". When it was republished as The Making and Breaking of Communist Europe, in 1991, he included a personal postscript about his own travels in an eastern Europe finally freed and reunited with the west.

Zeman was born in Prague and as a teenager had his secondary school education interrupted by the Nazi wartime occupation. Together with 100 other Czechoslovak students, he spent the 1946-47 academic year in Britain, to learn about the British way of life. One of his companions recalled how on returning home they were "more royalist than the king of England, having fallen in love with its values and lifestyle".

After that glimpse, Zeman resolved to flee Czechoslovakia. Whether or not he really skied across the border, as he claimed, he slowly worked his way across wartorn Germany and ended up in London in the hands of the small Czech emigre community. Thanks to the Czechoslovak Trust Fund, he completed a history degree at University College London in 1951. He then finished a doctorate at St Antony's College, Oxford. In Oxford he married a fellow student, the writer Anthea Collins.

Proficient linguistically, Zeman built his reputation as an unusual historian of the "German-Russian zone". He was briefly employed on the official team that edited the captured historical documents of the German foreign ministry, leading to his work Germany and the Revolution in Russia 1915-1918, published in 1958, and a scintillating biography of the international revolutionary, Alexander "Parvus" Helphand, published in 1965.

After a research fellowship in Oxford, he taught at the University of St Andrews and, in 1976, became the director of the Comenius Centre of East European Studies at Lancaster University. When he left in 1982, after the centre became unviable, he ensured that all his colleagues were found lectureships elsewhere, while the rich Comenius library followed him to a new research chair in European history at Oxford.

In these decades he was strikingly innovative on themes which many other historians have since pursued: Nazi Propaganda (1964), A Diplomatic History of the First World War (1971) and The Masaryks: The Making of Czechoslovakia (1976). In 1968, he was in Vienna when the Prague spring erupted; he briefly returned to Czechoslovakia and wrote an account of the subject for Penguin (Prague Spring: A Report On Czechoslovakia 1968). That experience spurred him to leave academia for a few years and join the fledgling Amnesty International. As the first director of Amnesty's research department, he set out to chronicle human rights abuses more systematically than ever before. In the early 70s, he edited Amnesty's report on torture, one of his proudest achievements.

Zeman was, at 6ft 5in, a bear of a man. He managed to have two homelands and always demonstrated a singular Anglo-Czech style of humour. In one of his last books, a biography of the statesman Edvard Beneš (1997), he analysed the life of another Czech who was forced into exile and established a European reputation, but finally returned home to Prague. He leaves a rich legacy of research into history and human rights.

He is survived by his second wife, the Czech historian Dagmara Hájková, and three children from his first marriage.